Online marketing — where to start and in what order

Most companies start with the question "how do we get higher in Google". It is a good question and rarely the first one. A site that ranks well and collects no enquiries costs the same as one nobody sees — and takes longer to fix, because the problem is less obvious.

This section is therefore arranged as an order of decisions, not a list of channels. Five entries below. Each names one problem, says who has it, and leads to the text that goes into detail.

Nobody can find us in search

The most common starting point and the most thankless, because results arrive in months rather than weeks. It is worth knowing, though, that the question about position is one step too far. Before it comes the question of whether the search engine holds your pages at all — and the answer can surprise. On our own site one page in five is indexed, with half of them crawled and declined.

Two things are worth settling before anyone starts work. First: which queries do you want to be visible for — "higher in Google" without naming a phrase is a wish, not a brief. Second: how will you know the work is progressing, because a monthly report is often the only evidence the service exists, and a report is easy to write so that it looks good whatever the outcome. What this work costs and what a monthly retainer should cover, we worked out in our article on SEO cost.

That text also answers the question that used to stand here separately: what to do when rankings suddenly drop. Diagnosing a drop is one of its sections, because the whole family of queries about falling positions amounts to a few dozen searches a month and does not sustain a document of its own.

→ SEO — what actually decides whether Google shows your site

There is traffic, but no enquiries

This problem looks like a traffic problem and is often mistaken for one. The symptom: statistics rise, the phone stays quiet. The cause almost never lies in the number of visits but in what the site does with a visitor — whether the first screen says clearly what you offer and to whom; whether it asks for contact at the moment somebody is ready to give it; and whether it puts obstacles in the way that nobody inside the company notices, because everyone knows the site by heart.

The most common of those obstacles are mundane: a form asking for seven fields where two would do; a phone number that is not tappable on a phone; a price absent everywhere, on the assumption that the customer will ask anyway.

This is also the only area of the five where improvement shows in weeks rather than quarters — because it does not require the search engine's agreement. The same traffic simply starts leaving more contacts.

→ Conversion rate — what that number really tells you, and what it does not

Our whole presence stands on somebody else's platform

An account on somebody else's platform is convenient at the start and risky later. Reach changes without warning, the follower list does not belong to the company, and the terms can change at any moment — and do, sometimes with advance notice, but never with your agreement.

The point is not to choose one of two channels but to settle what each of them does: where the conversation happens, where the decision is made, and what remains when the platform changes the rules. Social media is good at something a website is weak at — reaching people who are not yet looking for you.

→ Renting your audience — what a social profile gives you, and what it never will

We have contacts but do nothing with them

Addresses collected from enquiries, from orders, from somebody downloading something — sitting in an inbox and a spreadsheet, with nobody returning to them. This is the cheapest channel a company can start, and at the same time the one where it is easiest to do yourself harm: a single send to people who never agreed to it can wreck your deliverability for months.

It is also worth knowing, before anybody shows you a chart, that the open rate stopped measuring people — the maker of the mail client says so plainly, and the publisher of the most-quoted benchmark warns against its own number.

→ Email marketing — where to start, and why open rates no longer tell you anything

We have offline contact and want to move it online

A business card, a leaflet, packaging, an invoice, a vehicle livery, a plate by the door. QR codes and short links are cheap, take up little space, and are the only items on that list that show directly how many people crossed from print to the website — because every carrier can have its own address.

That has two practical effects. The argument about whether the leaflet works ends: either there are visits from its address or there are not. And carriers can be compared with each other, which means you can stop paying for the one that brings nothing.

→ QR codes and short links in marketing

In what order

If you have to pick one for the coming quarter:

• The site has traffic but no enquiries → start with conversion. Fastest effect and it needs nobody's agreement.
• The site is invisible in search → start with SEO, but assume months, not weeks. Check the index status first — sometimes there is nothing there to optimise.
• All sales go through one profile → start by moving contact onto a channel of your own. That is a week's work and it guards against something that happens without warning.
• You hold a list of addresses and do nothing with it → the cheapest item on this list and the most commonly skipped.
• You do not know which of these is your case → that is itself the answer: the measurement is missing and that is where to begin.

What this section deliberately leaves out: paid advertising. It is a separate subject with a separate budget, and mixing it with the above usually ends in paying for traffic the site cannot handle anyway.